After talking to Brett Gelman for about thirty minutes I think I can say he’s not that much like the characters he plays on TV. If he is he hides it well over the phone, where he’s polite and gracious and never once tries to kill me. That is a good thing, of course, as his characters are usually frightening. Few comedians today can match Gelman when it comes to portraying either wild-eyed mania or an extreme lack of intelligence. You’ve seen it in his work in Eagleheart, NBC’s Go On and FX’s Married, but the purest distillation of Gelman on TV can be found in his Adult Swim specials. His second half hour special, Dinner With Family With Brett Gelman and Brett Gelman’s Family, airs on Adult Swim at 12:30 AM ET on February 13. Also starring legends Tony Roberts and Patti LuPone, it’s a dark sequel to last year’s equally dark Dinner With Friends With Brett Gelman and Friends, which is some of the blackest comedy I’ve ever seen on TV. Both are hilarious and incredibly hard to watch, and below Gelman explains why it’s important for comedy to make us confront the darkness.
Paste: Why would we want to come eat with you?
Brett Gelman: Why would you want to come eat with me? I think you’re going to experience some things that you haven’t experienced at a dinner before. You know, a lot of emotion, a lot of new ideas, new ways of looking at things. You’ll experience a lot of childhood trauma as well. And I think sometimes in life we have to do that: to really face our trauma and deal with it so we can move forward.
Paste: So it could be cathartic for us then?
Gelman: No, I think Dinner with Family stands on its own, but I think you’ll have more of an understanding of it. Perhaps a different, deeper understanding with it. I mean, it is a companion piece, but it’s not like you won’t understand what’s going on. But I would recommend watching the first one. One specific thing I would say is mine and Anthony Atamanuik’s character, who played Joey in the last special, there’s sort of a reference to that, but even if you didn’t see the last special, it’s not like it would hold back your enjoyment of the new one at all.
Paste: So Friends was really dark and shocking, kind of in that Adult Swim way. How do you one-up that with Family? Or have you just gone in a totally different direction with it?
Gelman: No, we definitely go in a dark direction. I would say that some of the stuff in this special does the most unsettling things that have ever been on television. And I think it’s darker because there’s a lot of people—and these are people who have great relationships with their families, I certainly did—it’s very easy to make it a subject of darkness because they’re the first people that you ever know. And you come out like a being knowing nothing and being open to everything, so everything is immediately traumatic. No matter what parents do, they’re screwed. They’re going to traumatize their children. Just the actual act of birthing them is a traumatic event. They’re thrust from the perfect world of the womb and then brought into a complete, unstable reality.
Paste: What do you think your parents would think of the show?
Gelman: My parents? Well, it’s not autobiographical, but my mother doesn’t like it when I get too dark. So, I think that she would be very upset by this. I’ve already told her that she should wait a little bit to watch. She should wait until she’s feeling very, very positive until she watches it because, you know, nobody likes to see their son behave the way I do at times. By no means would she be upset by the content or think that it had anything to do with her. Thank God. I mean, I hope not or I got a real fucking problem on my hands. A Jewish mother feeling betrayed is never a good thing. That’s not a good thing, not something you want to deal with, man.
Paste: You deal with that kind of darkness a lot. Like Eagleheart was pretty violent, too. What’s the appeal of that as a comedian?
Gelman: I think it’s laughing at all the horrors of life. I know everybody says that, but I think it’s good to take what really scares us and what bothers us, and blow that out in order so that we can kind of take the sting out of it, like Joan Rivers did. You got to laugh at the dragon. So it’s taking all of these dark things—and what me and Jason also like to do is really embody that with these specials, and just see how dark we can go and see how much we can blur the line. And this isn’t dark just in a scary, violent way. It really does have to do with the issues of being a kid, being a parent and all the things that can go wrong. Like, what are we supposed to joke about? How great everything is? I mean, that’s boring. It’s like whenever anybody says a comedic character’s unlikeable, like, “Well, what do you want to watch? A perfect person just being nice to people all day?” That’s not exciting. People only say that because they feel a personal twinge from a particularly offensive thing they’re watching. It’s pretty interesting that—and I am by no means the first person to say this—but what most people get freaked out about is sex. So, why sex more than violence? Well, most people have sex, but most people don’t kill people. So, you’re seeing actual things that you experience and that you’re about come into play, I think it starts to hit home and that’s when people get upset.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
